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When Rizzoli first approached designer Sandy Liang to make a coffee table book, the downtown darling admitted the project was never one she would have had enough “rizz” to propose on her own. The prospect of a book, uneditable once on shelves, presented an overwhelming feeling of finality compared to the ever-evolving, ephemeral language of fashion design. Tweaks can be made between the runway and the rack. Have an itch to reinvent your own archival silhouette? There’s always next season. “I’m one of those people who feels like the job is never done,” says Liang, while flipping through the book’s pages in her Lower East Side studio for the very first time. However, one nagging sentiment prompted the designer to put it all on the page: Liang has never kept an official archive, and so, Dressing Up, a hand-annotated diary of a decade of memories, was born.
Despite her studio being stickered with photos, sprinkled with tchotchkes, and stuffed to the brim with fabric samples, clothing racks, and sewing machines—you name it—the Sandy Liang archive, in the most concrete sense of the term, is pretty much nonexistent. There’s no printed and bound catalogue of first look polaroids from each runway show, nor is there a single temperature-controlled storage unit housing all of the greatest hits, and innumerable old sketches have either been thrown out or lost to time. In the designer’s own words: “It’s a freaking mess.” But it’s a “mess” that this project has prompted Liang to shape anew.
